On a bucolic September morning in the suburbs of Gurugram, Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, the artists popularly known as T&T, stand out as bright spots of colour against the manicured green lawn that skirts their studio — all glass and grey walls. Kitted out in self-designed outfits, Tagra, 38, sports a blue waistcoat and shorts offset by a white T-shirt, while Thukral is in fuchsia trousers and waistcoat, and a yellow tee.
They are unlike any artists you may have met in the millennium. Irreverent, humorous and comically dark, their works — paintings, sculptures, installations and a series of ingenious games — are designed to be entertaining but underlined by a social, spiritual or environmental message. Currently working on a solo project at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (slated to be unveiled in June 2018), the duo is also putting up an elaborate performance piece at the National Gallery of Modern Art, which will critically look at the GST levied on art, while interrogating the buying and selling of art as opposed to the making of it. While the former project is still in its research stages, they are willing to share a sneak peek into their New Delhi piece, slotted for this December.
Of canvases and tennis balls
“We want to pose a question to our audience: is it more important for an artist to just create work or to be collected by the right kind of collectors? To achieve this, we have designed a series of questions that will be administered by ‘trained museum staff’. We are also calling for free entry of artworks to be ‘sold’ to collectors, in a mock auction,” begins Tagra, the more talkative of the two. He adds that GST was woven in to address a simple point: if artists have to pay 12% to 28% on sales (besides tax on art materials), and galleries need their cut of 40% to 50%, what are they finally left with?
Admitting that while they could have happily continued painting “and remained in our comfort zone”, they wanted to shake things up. “This is why we are constantly designing new ways in which to interact with our audience, through performance and games,” Tagra adds. It’s no wonder that the duo connects with millennials, with this love of the here and now. Thukral, meanwhile, is clearly the number cruncher — the back-end guy who likes to make your head spin with hardcore data. “In our last project in Hong Kong and at the Bikaner House, we used over 84,000 table tennis balls to create sculptures. Did you know that table tennis is a form of lawn tennis adopted by the British because it was too hot for them to play outside?” he says, as Tagra calls me over to play a game on their self-designed TT table. Shaped like the seven islands of Bombay, the piece symbolises the city before it was reclaimed into one unit and tells the story of Bombay-Mumbai in a fun manner.
As we drop ping pong balls and laugh, they tell me the work was one of the prime exhibits at their defining 2015 exhibition at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum, titled The Games People Play. Thukral says with thinly-concealed pride, “Our exhibition was visited by 64,000 people, the biggest crowd the museum had seen in months! I think it happened because we set it up as a gaming arena that engaged and peaked people’s curiosity.”
Multimedia approach
Former art directors from the advertising world, T&T have been working together since 2000 and have exhibited over 100 board games and countless paintings. They have shown across India and internationally, in Paris, Denmark, Tokyo, Beijing and the UK. Some of their earlier work, like the Escape Series, celebrated Punjabi culture, with neo-classical portraits of turbaned Sardar boys migrating to Canada or the UK. Another one, called the Chocolate Boy series, had the boys featured on chocolate syrup bottles. A memorable one was when they filled a gallery with faux supermarket racks, stacked with products labelled ‘Bosedk’ (an anglicisation of the Punjabi swear word).
- ₹1,49,98,101 is the highest record price for a painting by Thukral and Tagra, titled ‘I Like My Man Covered Too’, which sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 2008
- 84,000 table tennis balls were used to create sculptures for their exhibition at Bikaner House in 2016.
- 64,000 people visited their exhibition, The Games People Play, at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai in 2015
- 4,00,000 jobs were affected because of demonetisation. So T&T made 4,00,000 rice balls, for their installation titled Out of Play, to mark “solidarity to the labour class”
Then they moved into the ‘serious’ realm — of painting and sculpture. A defining project was Put It On. “We did this based on all the research Sumir had done on HIV AIDS during his MA at the National Institute of Design. We found that while there were many ad campaigns, none of them had penetrated into the bedroom,” says Thukral, a post graduate of Delhi’s College of Art. So they designed some seriously sexy products — like underwear that reminded men to put them on, flip-flops that demonstrated how to wear condoms, and sheets that equated love with wearing a condom. (The duo, accompanied by a doctor, also went to local weekly markets and distributed the flip-flops for ₹5.)
Besides commissioned work for brands like Meissen, the German porcelain manufacturers, and Absolut Vodka, in 2013, they even ventured into fashion, creating a capsule collection of handbags and small leather goods for Etro. Called Mirabilia, it reinterpreted the Italian fashion house’s signature paisley, with figurative elements, geometric motifs and psychedelic patterns.
Of course, as artists blurring the lines between fine art, pop culture and product placement, they have faced their fair share of criticism — especially for their computer-generated art work. However, their deeply aesthetic creations, reflecting the concerns of our times and backed by mountains of research, have also found tremendous following. Their work has been auctioned at Sotheby’s with eight-figure price tags, been picked up by art collectors like Frank Cohen and pop star Elton John, and also been placed alongside international contemporaries like Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami and American multimedia artist Matthew Barney.
The bigger picture
As the conversation continues, we enter their double-height studio, which has none of the clutter of brushes, paints, unfinished canvases and stacks of drawing paper that characterises most artists’ spaces. Instead, it is meticulously neat and looks more like a giant installation. On the left, a recent board game, titled Walk of Life, is laid out on a table with chairs drawn up as if inviting you to play.
It is an interpretation of the traditional Ganjifa cards, where dice is used to move the pieces forward, and a spinning wheel decides earthly calamities. Each card depicts one of the Dushavatar (the 10 earthly incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu) and the objective is to pay off one’s ‘debts’ and equalise one’s ‘scores’. The game was part of the Games People Play exhibition (a later modification for KHOJ had them introducing water conservation into the game, set in the kali yuga ).
In summer this year, T&T showcased an interactive piece, Bread Circuses and WIFI. Shown at The Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong Soho, it encouraged people to play a game where they cut off measured slices of bread, according to instruction cards. Bread, in this context, implies that the material culture of art is a way of surviving in the new economy, while circus alludes to the use of entertainment as a delay tactic for dealing with politics or initiating social changes. Once again, the duo shows how satire and self-mockery bring larger issues into focus for them.
